Above Top Secret
by Chris7221
Summary: It should have been obvious that they couldn't keep it secret forever, that one day it would be blown right open. That sooner or later someone would talk and the whole thing would come crashing down. The advantages, the benefits to humanity, should have outweighed the disadvantages. But really, nobody had thought about it that much. Disclosure fic, satirical parody.


This was written on a bit of a whim. It's a disclosure fic, if you haven't guessed by now. It is not an overly serious fic, but the intention is to be more satirical than silly. It does contain swearing, violence, and maybe suggestive themes, hence the T rating.

This is part of my Gen4 series of fics, named that way for no real reason. I will be posting several stories, not really related, in the series. The idea is that the ones that turn out well (I like and my readers like) I will continue, and the others I will not.

Edward Thornton is named in honour of Eduard Khil, the trololo guy, who I recently learned had passed away a few months ago.

**Stargate Command**

"Huh."

"What is it?" Daniel asked, not bothering to stop reading the ancient text in his hands.

"You say the internet is a public forum, correct?" Vala Mal Doran asked from her position in front of Daniel's computer.

"I've explained this before, Vala," Daniel replied, exasperated.

"I never knew people _bought_ things and shared them freely."

"They do- what?"

"I found this website where you can get all kinds of things- movies, books, television programs, games, all for free."

Daniel put down the book and glanced at the monitor. His eyes widened. "Vala! That's a torrent site!"

"A what?" Vala asked, perplexed.

"It's illegal! It's piracy! It's stealing!"

"Stealing?" She cocked her head. "If I lend someone a disc with a movie on it, is that stealing?"

"Well, no."

"And if I lend it to a thousand people?"

"You're oversimplifying," Daniel insisted.

"Am not!"

"Am too!"

"Am not!"

"Am too!"

"Am too!"

"Am not!"

"Aha!" Vala pointed. "The Pirate Bay is not stealing!"

Daniel let out an exasperated sigh, but Vala cut him off before he could say anything. "It doesn't really matter, all this is besides the point. Look at this."

Daniel quickly scanned the torrent name. "No."

* * *

"You know, I've seen some scary shit on the internet," Cameron Mitchell remarked. "Furry porn, 2girls1cup, the Rick Roll, Skyrim glitches, Asgard porn, an illegal gun market- but this? This takes the cake."

"I'm sorry, what? I was trying to download the movie, the prequel to those ones with Sigourney Weaver in them."

"This is not your usual DVDrip," Colonel Samantha Carter told her. "These plans are nearly complete. Every detail of the X-303's design, from the power systems, the computers, the weapons, to the sublight engines. The only thing that's missing is the hyperdrive, and it's labelled in most of the diagrams- 'probably FTL drive'."

"And this was just floating around on the internet?" Vala remarked. "First the cargo ship on Google Earth, and now this? This planet certainly is a strange place."

"Obviously, this has huge ramifications," Daniel said, clearing his throat. "So far everyone has considered the leaked plans a joke, but it's only a matter of time before someone takes this seriously. It could blow the whole Stargate wide open."

"Now I'm no internet expert, but can't you just delete it?" Vala asked.

"No, it's not that simple," Cameron told her, shooting a look that said _do you even know how torrents work?_ "I think we should ask the host to take it down. They might think something's up, but it's better than having plans for a starship out there."

"Tracker, and I tried that," Sam replied, slightly embarassed. "I received a rather strongly worded letter, which I shall now quote verbatim.

"Hello and thank you for contacting us. We have removed the offending torrent. Oh wait, no we haven't, because it doesn't break any laws. It's not even that distasteful. Either someone put a lot of work into making a set of plans for a SCI-FI SPACESHIP, or you actually have a SCI-FI SPACESHIP that is currently flying around in space. Given the current technological level of Earth, it should be fairly obvious which possibility I believe. In case your military really is as incompetent as you say it is, it's the first one. I am inclined to believe you truly are that incompetent, as you show precisely zero knowledge of how torrents work.

"With that being said, I think it would be really awesome if humans did have a SCI-FI SPACESHIP. So in the off chance that there really is a SCI-FI SPACESHIP, I would like to share a few thoughts. First, that HOLY FUCK THAT IS AWESOME. Second, I understand the need for secrecy, but there are a lot of problems on Earth, like global warming and starvation and homeless people passed out in alleys. So if there really is alien technology that could fix all that, we would really appreciate it if you could use it, okay? That and it's kind of a piss-off to be a spacefaring race and not know about it. Finally, if you could give me a tour that would be really nice.

"Last, if this really is the United States Air Force, please don't bomb us. That would be an act of war against Sweden, and although we do not waste a lot of money on an oversized military we can be pretty vicious, okay? So an invasion would be bad for everyone.

"P.S. Prometheus is a really shitty name for a spaceship. It's a Greek tragedy, who wants that? I like Enterprise or The Screaming Weasel myself. I mean, who wouldn't be afraid of a ship called The Screaming Weasel?"

"Are you kidding me?" Cameron seethed. "They're _mocking_ us?"

"It's thepiratebay, Cam," Sam replied. "They deal with letters from copyright holders all the time. It's only to be expected that he would treat ours the same way."

"Please tell me you got a trace on them," he sighed.

"Their address is posted on their website, but it doesn't do us any good. Do I have to explain how torrents work?"

"Yes!"

"No!"

"Can we get rid of this?" Cam asked. He paused. "Wait, why are you even here? Don't you have a starship now?"

"Shore leave," Sam replied curtly before explaining. "I've managed to hack into the tracker logs and extract the IP addresses. Of course, the original uploader wasn't stupid, so he used a proxy server and VPN-"

"Sam," Cam asked. "Can we or can we not nab this guy?"

She sighed deeply. "Yes, we can get to the original uploader."

"Then let's get him."

* * *

**Spokane, Washington**

It was a dark, calm night. The neighbourhood had all but shut down. Even if the police hadn't shown up to cordon off the area and evacuate nearby civilians, there still wouldn't have been any interference. Of course, that was a risk the dark blobs arrayed around the house couldn't take. The entire area had been quietly evacuated.

Usually, SG-1 dressed in an olive green. For this occasion, they had exchanged the green for pitch black, adding gloves, balaclavas, and helmets as well. Each of them carried both an MP5SD and a SPAS-12 shotgun. The five members crouched on the back porch of the small, single-family home. On the other side, a six-man team from Special Tactics stood ready to bash in the front door.

"Team one, ready," Colonel Mitchell whispered over the radio. Behind him, Carter cringed slightly. Technically, she outranked him, but technically, she wasn't even part of the team anymore.

"Team two, ready," a gruff voice replied.

"Breaching breaching!" Mitchell shouted, squeezing the detonator in his hand. A small, flat piece of plastic explosive was planted in the centre of the door. It detonated, obliterating most of the wooden slab and blowing the rest off its hinges. The other team blew the front door, and they moved in.

Carter trained her weapon around, quickly searching. There was nobody in the kitchen, although the sink was overfilled and there was a pile of garbage in the corner. "Clear right!"

Vala moved to the left of the group to search the dining room. It was stacked with boxes, but no people. "Clear left!"

"Hallway clear!" one of the other team shouted.

"Up the stairs," Mitchell ordered. They could all hear the sounds coming from above. It sounded like... muted explosions?

He led them up the narrow staircase. The upper storey had several bedrooms and a bathroom. Most were dark, with open doors. One of them, however, was closed, with a band of light escaping below the door. There was a card attached to the doorknob, though none of them could make it out through their night-vision gear. If they could, they would have noticed it was a shameless plug for a certain brand of graphics card.

With a silent hand motion, he gave the order to move up. They stacked up next to the door, and he slowly removed a flashbang from his vest. Mitchell quickly pulled the pin, opened the door, tossed it and pulled the door shut again. There was a muffled bang and flash through the gaps of the door.

He threw the door open, weapon raised and ready. The team rushed into the room, filling the relatively small space. It could only be described as a gamer den. Though they didn't have time to take in the details, the room had a large TV on one end, with several gaming consoles connected to it. On the other side was a large desk with a massive full-tower PC below it and a six-monitor setup above. The walls were lined with a combination of shelving units stacked with bins and video game and hardware posters.

The lone occupant was a man that looked to be in his mid-twenties, fresh out of college. He was dressed in baggy sweatpants and a dirty T-shirt. He had fallen out of his swivel chair and was shouting, "What the FUCK, Treyarch?"

Carter and Mitchell shared a look. Before they could say anything, the man had scrambled back onto his chair and resumed whatever game it was he was playing. Mitchell cleared his throat. "Hey, heavily armed special forces team right behind you!"

"I know, I know!" the gamer replied. "Flank to the left, I'll breach in through the front."

"You have got to be kidding me," Mitchell groaned.

"Should we not simply pull him out of the chair?" Teal'c asked.

"No, I've got a better idea," Vala replied. She pointed her shotgun towards the PC sitting on the floor and pulled the trigger. The buckshot ripped through the motherboard and two of the graphics cards, shredding the PCB laminate along with most of the components on it. The monitors instantly died, and the lights on the computer shut off. "There."

"What the-" the gamer turned around, and his expression of anger turned to one of fear. "Oh shit oh shit oh shit-"

"Calm down," Mitchell reassured him. "All we need to do is ask a few questions."

"You don't break down doors and go in with guns to ask a few questions," Vala whispered to Daniel.

The gamer had fairly sharp hearing, and picked up on it. "Who are you? The Republicans? Look, all those things I said, I didn't really mean, okay? America is great! The mafia? Look, the terabytes of emkayvees I can explain, they're fair use! Unless..."

"Oh shit," he muttered darkly before passing out.

* * *

**Stargate Command**

"I want a lawyer. Hey, can you hear me? I want a lawyer!"

"So what's the game plan?" Cameron asked his team on the other side of the one-way mirror. "Who is this guy?"

"Edward Thornton, twenty-six, software engineer, graduated from Seattle University," Sam recited. "He tried to get several jobs at private corporations including Microsoft, Electronic Arts, and Google but was turned down each time."

"So, your stereotypical geek?"

"Basically."

"I dunno. Edward doesn't sound like a geeky name to me."

Edward banged on the glass again. "Look, okay, I guess I don't get a lawyer, cause of the Patriot Act and all that, but look, I wanna make a deal, okay, no waterboarding or any of that enhanced interrogation shit, I'll talk if you would LET ME!"

"Our prisoner is becoming increasingly agitated," Teal'c remarked.

"What I want to know is how he got involved," Daniel said. "I mean, how would a guy like that end up with that kind of knowledge?"

"Maybe he hacked in and stole it," Cam suggested.

Sam shook her head. "Actually, we gave him the contract."

"We trusted that guy with our national secrets? Now, Sam, I'm not trying to prey on stereotypes, but you don't just give some nerd the plans to a top-secret spaceship."

"We didn't," Sam replied. "The contract was very limited in scope and completely theoretical. Our friend in there wrote the software that regulates oxygen levels throughout the BC-305. Even for us it's theoretical. We haven't built it yet."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"How the hell do you go from 'software that regulates oxygen levels' to 'complete plans for interplanetary warship'?" Cam asked wryly. "And why would you post it on the internet?"

"I don't know, but I'm going to find out?"

Daniel arched an eyebrow. "You're going to find out?"

"Remember what Cam said. 'He's a nerd, kinda like you, Sam'."

* * *

"Hey, can I have my..." Edward began after the door opened and Sam stepped inside, his voice trailing off.

"Edward Thornton?" Sam asked, smiling.

He coughed. "Uh, yeah, that's me."

"Colonel Samantha Carter, United States Air Force. Ph.D."

Edward remained silent, and she gently prodded, "Something wrong?"

He coughed again. "Um, well, I tend to be kinda awkward around women, and the military scares me, and you're both, so, uh, yeah."

A pause, and he looked up at her. "That and I think I've ended up in the middle of a government conspiracy."

"What makes you say that?"

"I seed a torrent containing plans for a starship," he began explaining, rather loudly. "A week later, a team of commandos storms my house and I wake up in an interrogation room. A few hours after that, I'm sitting across from an Air Force colonel."

"We just want to ask a few questions," Sam replied gently.

"Is that what the commando unit is for? Look, uh, does the Patriot Act apply here? Because I really want my lawyer right now."

She took a deep breath. There was really no way around it, but she didn't have to reveal the truth, at least not the whole truth. Not yet. "This goes above Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, counter-terrorism. What you did may have compromised the defence of our planet."

Edward's head snapped upwards. "Uh, did you just say what I think you said?"

"The defence of our planet. A government agency known as Home_world_ Security has been tasked with safeguarding the safety of our planet against alien threats."

"Like the Men in Black?"

"In a way, yes."

"No shit?"

"I'm afraid not. The threat out there is very real. We have been visited, even attacked in the past." She paused. "So now that you know what's really at stake, I need to know how you got these plans."

"Shit, shit, shit." The nerd took a deep breath. "What about them? It's a long story."

"Start from the beginning."

Edward leaned back in his chair. "I think it was six or seven months ago. I work at this crappy little software startup- we make database solutions that cause more problems than they solve- and I'm always looking for a better job. The government occasionally hands out contracts even for things they maybe shouldn't- like those two stoner kids that got filthy rich dealing arms. I bid on one and got it."

"Environmental control software," Sam muttered.

"Yeah. Nothing exciting, but a little different, and I kinda like embedded programming. Working with limited resources like that has a certain charm. When I got the exact specifications, I started thinking a little. It called for networking across large systems and an ability to adapt to damaged systems. Not too unusual. But the scale was way too big for something like a Space Shuttle. Maybe it was theoretical work. I'd buy that."

"Obviously, you didn't."

"I almost did," he replied, emphasizing the 'almost'. "But I was on Skype with one of my friends from university- the bastard loves to gloat about his nice job at Microsoft. I like to smash Windows 8 in his face- but I suppose you don't care about that."

"I hated it myself, but in my line of work you have more to worry about than the loss of a Start Menu," Sam replied lightly.

"Yeah, I bet. Anyway, my friend was gloating about something or other- I don't even remember what it was, but I think it had something to do with Windows, when I ask him if he knows anyone else as successful. For the first time- the first goddamn time- he admits it, mentions his cousin. Real smart guy, met him once, a mechanical engineer. He says he's designing a spaceship for NASA."

"What did you say to him?"

"I told him where to shove it. He said it's true, I ask him to prove it, he sends me some of what they gave to his cousin. Turns out it's Air Force, not NASA, and he's doing stress analysis for theoretical airframe designs. Remember that this guy- my friend, not his cousin- is a computer geek. No mechanical mind. I take one look and realize that it's complete bullshit. Or at least, it seemed that way at the time. We started talking about Origin-" Sam suppressed a flinch at the mention of that. "-and spent the rest of the night bashing EA. That was that."

"It wasn't really, was it?"

"Nope. I had the plans open in a tab in Firefox when I was working on my own thing, the environmental control software. I got kinda distracted and looked at it a bit more. The shapes were all wrong- not aerodynamic at all, but maybe I just didn't know what I was looking at. Maybe it would have looked legit if I knew what I was doing. And then I saw the numbers, the tensile strength and all that, and it didn't match anything I'd ever seen. It might have been lack of sleep or the Mass Effect playthrough talking, but I started to make some Wild Mass Guesses that I was looking at an alien spaceship.

"On a whim, I compared it to the software I was writing. Well, that's not really an accurate term, it's like comparing apples and syntax. The environmental control software would work for a starship, something big, maybe something alien. It was one in the morning and I was awake on caffeine only, and in my stupor I started sending out feelers, posting on boards, asking questions. I figured that maybe the government found something, something alien, and was using a kind of distributed computing to reverse-engineer it."

"You saw some plans that didn't fit and assumed it was the government dissecting an alien spacecraft?"

"It was one in the morning! I get crazy when it gets late! It's also one of the best times for coding, but I digress. I started talking to other engineers, in all kinds of fields, that had received similar weird contracts. Some of them didn't want to talk, some of them weren't allowed to, some of them did anyway and some of them didn't. It took a couple months but I finally pieced it all together. A starship. A big one, Earth technology and alien technology combined. I thought I was crazy at the time, it was probably nothing, but I figured what the hell. So I seeded what I'd put together. Probably should have used the deepnet, but I wanted to reach as many people as possible."

"Why did you do that? You had contacts in the government, why not just ask for more information?"

He chuckled. "That wouldn't get me anywhere, except maybe Gitmo. And I, uh, don't really like the government. I don't have a problem with America- well, maybe I do, but I really don't like the man. I stick it to the man whenever I can. And I figured, if this was really big, if I was right, the people had the right to know."

"I almost wish I'd been wrong." Edward paused for a while, then suddenly blurted out, "Why keep it secret?"

"Various reasons. We don't want things like politics or business getting in the way. But mostly, it's to keep the world's population from panicking. We've discovered things that would literally change the world overnight."

"Look, I don't know what kind of alien technology you have, but if you can build a starship, it's got to be pretty advanced. I do know there are a lot of problems out there, from global warming to world hunger to dumb shits like me who can't get jobs. If you can cure cancer, I think the risks are worth it."

"You're oversimplifying," Sam replied simply. "There's a lot more going on than you think."

"Okay, okay." He paused again. "One more thing. I had a bit of a feeling something like this might happen- hoped it wouldn't, but feared it might. So I stashed away a little bit more in a safety deposit box to be released to journalists if I stopped checking in. Prometheus was the most complete but I know there are at least two other designs."

"Why did you do that?"

He shrugged. "Just watch too many fuckin' movies. I think the whole thing came from watching too many movies, too much TV, too many games."

"Thank you for your time, Mister Thornton."

As she turned to leave, he asked, "Can I have my lawyer now?"


End file.
